F3nd0

I feel that’s a gross mischaracterisation of the author’s beliefs. David Revoy has always been a very vocal supporter of free software, showing great respect for the work that goes into it and appreciation for the community around it.

He clearly states that for him, abandoning Linux is ‘not possible right now’. Which makes sense, because GNU/Linux has been the free user-friendly alternative. What else do people expect him to do? Jump ship to BSD or GNU/Hurd and expect his entire workflow to work perfectly on day one? Start painting using pencil and paper, completely changing the nature of his work from day to day?

Moreover, if Linux, Ubuntu, or Debian (I’m not quite up to date on that) have accepted AI contributions, it’s because their maintainers have decided to accept them. It’s not like David has been vibecoding his tools to replace human-made software; he just can’t be expected to flawlessly work around everyone else who decides to do that. Contrasting him exercising control over his own work to stifle AI and choosing to (at least temporarily) tolerate others not doing the same with theirs (that he in turn makes use of) as some kind of hypocrisy is in extremely bad taste.

> He doesn't look a day over 90!

He still has quite a ways to go to 1485715964481761497309522733620825737885569961284688766942216863704985393094065876545992131370884059645617234469978112000000000000000000000. :-)

jxl-rs is only a decoder, so equivalent to djxl rather than libjxl as a whole.

> It wasn't some one company's choice and push.

How so? This table [1] shows the adoption dates for WebP in various popular programs (as does Wikipedia [2]). Of all high-profile programs, Chrome was the only early adopter; other browsers were avoiding it for years, not to mention off-line software. Mozilla went as far as to work on a JPEG encoder [3] after WebP was introduced by Google, to see if maybe JPEG itself could be improved enough. How does that not read like one company’s choice and push?

> Almost everyone wins when bandwidth is cut and you get higher quality for less space.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean you immediately adopt every new codec that brings improvements in some area. With every new feature comes new code, new baggage, new potential attack surface. You have to ask if the improvements are big and consistent enough to go through the effort and burden the entire ecosystem with yet another format everyone now has to deal with. You need to think of the user and developer experience both in and outside of the web.

Microsoft would have been perfectly within their right to blame the format, since Google just decided to let it run wild on the web without garnering more support for it first. The format has its pros and cons, and it’s up to all the involved parties to weigh them and hopefully reach a consensus.

  [1]: https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl#_strong_strong_timing_and_interoperability
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Support
  [3]: https://research.mozilla.org/2014/03/05/introducing-the-mozjpeg-project/

Again, when exactly has Google endorsed JPEG XL? When did they promise to ship it in Chrome stable? Sure, they had it in development as an experimental feature at first, but so did Firefox.

The way I read it, both companies were tentatively interested until Google said they changed their mind, and shortly after Mozilla decided they didn’t really care. Correlation doesn’t imply causality, but their positions followed a somewhat similar trajectory at the very least. (In contrast with, say, Apple.)

I just don’t see where you keep getting the idea that Google was at some point far more supportive of JPEG XL adoption than Mozilla was.

> Mozilla has a vested interested in pushing all things related to AV1, including AVIF.

Why? AV1 was developed as a video codec. That doesn’t imply it’s as good of an image format nor that everyone who supported its development has vested interest in making it into one. Just because someone has made a cool hammer doesn’t imply they now need to view everything as nails. (This provenance even brings some drawbacks with it, yet this time seemingly no one took a pause before tossing in yet another image format.)

> Their hope was to use the existence of AVIF as leverage to give hardware vendors more incentive to provide hardware support for AV1.

This is the first time I’m reading about this and I’m having a hard time seeing how decoding images would make for a significant incentive to provide hardware support (especially when everyone was already more or less on board with AV1 as a video codec). But I could be wrong, of course. If you can provide any links where Mozilla gives this reason for adopting AVIF or any hardware vendor gives significant consideration to decoding AVIF in hardware, it would be much appreciated.

Personally, I avoid WebP out of spite. While it has greatly improved over previous formats in certain uses, it has been lacking or offering only marginal improvements in others. That didn’t stop Google from pushing it hard on the web.

I was left feeling like the next time we adopt a format that tries to do everything, it should actually do everything just as well or better than its predecessors. Lo and behold, JPEG XL is probably the first format which actually achieves this, covering all kinds of pictures you can think of and doing a pretty good job on all of them. So for the first time, I feel like the format has actually earned its place in the ecosystem, rather than just being some megacorporation’s personal favourite.

Of course, this point of view is emotional more than rational. Technically, WebP is a sensible choice, so I don’t mean to discourage anyone from using it today.

Firefox did not take very long to support AVIF (another recent image format clearly favoured by Google). Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not aware of Mozilla expressing any reluctance over AVIF’s abysmal lossless performance or other shortcomings (some of which have been addressed since), or insisting on using a memory-safe decoder like they have for JPEG XL. Why the stark difference in treatment?

We may not be able to say for certain, but Google’s massive influence is by far the most plausible explanation I can think of. And if the first step in your decision making is looking at what Google is doing, then ‘following marching orders’ is suddenly not such a bad description. (One can argue that with 3 % market share they don’t have much choice, but that’s beside the point.)

That’s not at all how it went.

Years ago, both Chrome and Firefox had experimental support. In October 2022, Chrome suddenly announced their decision to drop it (citing dubious reasons like lack of interest or improvements over existing formats). [1] It was only later, in January 2023, that Mozilla announced their formal position of not really caring about the format. [2]

In October 2023, one of the JPEG XL devs said that the responsible team at Google was ready to write a decoder in Rust if that was the only reason holding adoption back, even offering to work on browser integration. [3] One month later, another dev confirmed that a different pre-existing decoder written in Rust was already standard-conformant. [4]

It wasn’t until September 2024, nearly a whole year later, that Mozilla changed their official position from not caring to waiting for a suitable decoder written in Rust. [5] And it was only then that jxl-rs development really picked up. [6] Only later on, Chrome decided to change their position as well, but we can only speculate on what actually changed their mind.

There was no Google shoving JPEG XL down everyone’s throat like they once did with WebP. There was no Mozilla taking a clear, principled stance from the get-go. Whether or not JPEG XL was worth it, neither of these companies has acted in a transparently fair, exemplary way. And of course the first major browser to ship JPEG XL support to users was Safari, which may well have played a role in the others’ decision-making.

  [1]: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment85
  [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/522#issuecomment-1409539985
  [3]: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/430#issuecomment-1776762287
  [4]: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/430#issuecomment-1811972676
  [5]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
  [6]: https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs/graphs/contributors?from=03%2F01%2F2024&to=01%2F01%2F2026

The article brings attention to advancements in AVIF encoders over the past few years (to which its author has greatly contributed), but does not provide a definitive comparison between the two formats, even when it comes to the web. Parts of it are entirely based on personal opinions and educated guesses.

There are some unanswered questions about the methodology used, the resources spent on development of the respective encoders is not taken into consideration, the future developments of JPEG XL encoding are written off as too costly and the author’s opinion on what kind of content is appropriate for the web is quite subjective. See also the recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690554

And even Firefox took well over a year to bring it up, after stating they didn’t really care for JPEG XL. It was literally no one’s primary concern from the get-go.

I think that’s why they were advocating for gzip or bzip2 instead of just relying on PNG’s built-in compression.

One thing to note is that even when WebP did eventually get support in many places, it often look a very long time because there just wasn’t that much motive or interest to support it. So for years it was the weird format you’d accidentally download from the web and have little luck getting to work off-line.

The non-exhaustive table linked below shows how long it took for different programs to support different image formats since their introduction. Outside of Chrome, Chrome in disguise, and whatever has become of Firefox, adoption of JPEG XL has been far more enthusiastic than it ever has for WebP—or AVIF, for that matter. So we are very unlikely to have a long period when JPEG XL only works on the web and nowhere else.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl#_strong...

Both JPEG XL and WebP far exceed AVIF when it comes to lossless. For lossy, AVIF used to do better at low quality and JPEG XL at high quality. But apparently AV1 encoders have improved a lot since then, closing the distance. An article comparing the two was posted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690554

The author, who has worked on said AV1 encoders, has expressed doubt that JPEG XL encoders could improve much with only reasonable amounts of effort, but that was also only their personal (if educated) guess. With JPEG XL finally seeing adoption on the web, we will hopefully see work on the reference encoder resume in earnest soon.

So for now, I’d say you’re fine with AVIF. Unless you’re doing lossless, because AVIF sucks at lossless. (And JPEG XL has the unique feature of supporting lossless JPEG transcoding, too.)

> Reality is a lot simpler - it wasn't deemed worth the cost of addressing the security problems in the existing library so someone chose to abandon the format.

As evidenced by what? When first rejecting JPEG XL, Google did share their reasoning, but security problems hardly figured in it.

Incidentally, the previous most efficient known algorithm for integer multiplication was co-discovered by the chief author of GNU TeXmacs, a typesetting word processor.

Not directly mentioned in the article: The decoder is licensed as free software and/but seems to have been developed with extensive use of Claude.

It’s neat that you can compile it without hand-written assembly for more safety, but what does the performance look like in that case? I assume the presented benchmarks don’t show this?

Fair enough, but are we talking credit score or shaming by other users/citizen? Shaming and bullying people who are perceived as having done something wrong on-line is not unheard of in ‘the west’. I suppose it concerns famous people far more than your ordinary social circles, though.

> Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles.

And with that single sentence, you have provided a great counter-example. Had you included it in your first comment, you would have saved yourself yet another order of magnitude’s worth of words to type out and contributed to the culture here far more, no?

For what it’s worth, the original comment did not read as blatantly racist to me, though I see how one could read it that way.

I assume it runs deeper, but that doesn’t feel all that foreign compared to the US, does it?

In what way has KDE dropped accessibility in their latest releases? (Genuine question; first time hearing about this, but I do not follow the space closely.)

Is Matrix really non-bloated? My impression has been that it works more reliably, but isn’t considered lean at all.

What’s so complex about it? From what I gather (after skimming the document just now), you attach an extra element to a message which says how to style which parts of the message, from codepoint n to codepoint m, essentially. At least conceptually, that seems really simple and straightforward.

Are there more elegant or natural ways to do it? Probably. But when you say ‘extremely complex’, saying ‘codepoints 7 to 15 should be bold’ is not what comes to my mind.

Why settle for lite?

You kept bringing attention to the fact that ‘a 17 year old is a child’, as if the legal distinction was relevant to a discussion on morality. I addressed it because it was beyond the point. What happened to her was morally equally bad whether she was 17 or 18 at the time.

‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.

Yes, that’s exactly my point. Law usually draws a (somewhat arbitrary) line between child and adult, but what really happens is that people mature gradually, so while the practical difference between a 10-year-old and a 30-year-old is great, the practical difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old is minuscule.

The very fact they are giving her an ultimatum/deadline holds that implication. At the very least, it would be likely to further the backlash and upset even more people (who oppose this use of AI). Whether they had anything else in mind is not clear, but it’s clear that it was nothing good, otherwise she would have no reason to give in to their demands and the entire captured conversation would be utterly absurd and pointless.

Unless you mean to imply that any sexual acts between a young person and a remarkably older one ought to begin with the former showing their ID to prove they are in fact of age, the fact that she was legally ‘a child’ is irrelevant to the moral failing at hand. (Because it would be absurd for the morality of the act to radically shift based on whether it takes place a couple of months later or earlier.)

I do agree it was a significant moral failing (assuming he did go through with it), even if she did indeed present herself as willing and appeared of age. I don’t agree that trying to differentiate it from other related moral failings (even if it’s in a better light) constitutes a moral failing in itself, though. It is beside the point and not helpful to the matter at hand, but I don’t see much harm in it.

It does seem entirely possible (not sure about ‘most plausible’) she would have presented herself as entirely willing. I see no fundamental problem with that statement. (Note that there’s a huge difference between ‘presented herself as entirely willing’ and ‘was entirely willing’, which I should hope you’re keeping in mind.)

Legally, a 17 year old may be a child in many jurisdictions, but that fact alone has little bearing on their appearance and maturity, so how is it relevant to the topic here? Had she been several months older at the time, would that have had any bearing on her interactions with Minsky, given her situation?